


Oh! let your smiles but clear the weather

by dancing_roses



Category: Enola Holmes (2020), Enola Holmes Series - Nancy Springer
Genre: Adult Enola, F/M, Flash Fic, Gen, Language of Flowers, Late 1880s England
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26646577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancing_roses/pseuds/dancing_roses
Summary: A twenty-first birthday brings bouquets and promises.
Relationships: Cecily Alistair & Enola Holmes, Enola Holmes/Viscount "Tewky" Tewksbury
Comments: 28
Kudos: 426





	Oh! let your smiles but clear the weather

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: I clearly can't do math in my head because Enola is supposed to have been born in 1884 (in the movie universe) or 1875 (in the book universe). So I guess this is an AU where she was born in 1868? I'm too lazy to change the dates in this piece anyway so it'll stay at it is, but ugh, numbers.

_Mid-May, 1889_

The morning sun on the first day of her twenty-first year brought orange-ginger-lavender wafting up the steps from the kitchen, the hem of her tea gown obscuring twice-stockinged feet on the cool floorboards. It was spring, a season unbeknownst to haze-filled London.

At breakfast, a note from Cecily settled on blue pattern china, chipped, the handwriting neater than her best forgery could accomplish. (Clearly Cecily had been able to relearn some things at university, but not the ambidextrousness.) She sighed and ate her toast, drank her tea. A birthday dinner, she’d promised, although she’d hoped for a dappled afternoon picnic instead but the smog was too thick and the wind chill. She was already disinclined for celebrations, the weather did not help.

Her brothers would be wanting to see her, that was a certainty she didn’t need reasoning to deduce. Five years almost to the day and she still wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, what to feel. But it would be necessary. Proper, even.

She must impress them, there was no doubt, she thought, trailing back up to her room with letter in hand to decide how to face the day.

Who did she feel like? A rose, wool and trimmed with velvet ribbon? Or maybe some sort of bramble, all prickly in tweed and white shirtwaist. Or perhaps the suit she’d nicked from Baker Street, had tailored down to her size. No, that wouldn’t do, not at all. Not for today, at least.

On went a new chemise, silk stockings, sturdy brown button boots, a white silk corset, small ruffled bustle, corset cover, several petticoats. Then an underskirt of white silk painted with fleur-de-lis, a light hyacinth blue overskirt, and a matching swallowtail jacket in the revived Directoire style that Cecily had said was all the fashion in Paris this year. It had been more than she wished to pay for clothing but it was her birthday, after all, and she had a sneaking suspicion that the bustle wouldn’t last into the new decade.

Her hair was twisted up and pinned into a serviceable roll with a much-practiced air, curls arranged on her forehead, and a flat straw hat (crowned with hyacinths) pinned atop to hide the wispy bits. She risked only a bit of lip tint today, her scarf would rub away at rouge (and hide her face).

So lost in thought was she that she nearly stepped over the bouquet resting on the threshold on her way out the door. A sprig of ivy winding round lupine ( _god knows where he found that_ ), myrtle, and parsley, with a blue silk ribbon like a tiny slice of summer sky knotting them together. Odd companions, perhaps, but then she was an odd person.

She picked it up, smiling, with the lightest of blushes staining her cheeks (she told herself it was the wind). Tucked it into a cream jug and set it on her windowsill, pointed towards the hidden sun, ribbon tails trailing. She had come to understand, after all, that “ _You’ll do very well on your own_ ” didn’t have to mean forever, didn’t have to mean loneliness or cold, sooty rooms above the underground tracks. Didn’t have to mean she lived in a world with no light, no air, no flowers.

Before she left the second time, she pinned a red chrysanthemum from the vase by her bed and one of the ivy leaves from the bouquet to her lapel. Her hand trembled just a little but she managed not to prick herself with the pin and chuckled at her own whirling thoughts. It would be answer enough for a stroll through the flower market and a quick tip of the hat from a passer-by, frock-tails long since changed for a grey gardener’s coat and the promise of a bright, sunny summer spent in flax fields and oak paths come June.

It would be answer enough for now, indeed, as he would well understand.

**Author's Note:**

> Ivy = Fidelity, marriage.  
> Lupine = Voraciousness, imagination.  
> Myrtle = Love  
> Parsley = Festivity  
> Red Chrysanthemum = I love.  
> Hyacinth = Sport, Game, Play.
> 
> All floral meanings taken from the 1884 book _Language of Flowers_ by Kate Greenaway.  
>   
> Enola's dress is from _Le Moniteur de la Mode_ , 1889: https://pin.it/OG7hbdd
> 
> Title from Thomas Carew's (1595-1640) poem, "Red and White Roses".


End file.
